Try out Distance, a race game where you have to dodge objects. It also features a great soundtrack.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/233610/Distance/

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

You play as a poverty-level janitor at a bustling space port. Scrounge by while longing for a better life, seeing wonderous things that are beyond your class/wage level to experience! It sounds depressing, but this is a very charming game.

Smushi Come Home

Cozy 3D platformer with no combat and tons of chill little dudes to talk to and help out.

PictoQuest

Nonogram RPG. The story is nonexistent and the dialogue is laughably bad, but this is one of the better picross games I've played because the puzzles do actually look like stuff, and the completed puzzles even have animation! Plus the added elememt of combat gives puzzle solving a fresh twist.

Okay, my last post, I promise!

A must-have: Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition goes on sale for 3 euros (normally 20 euros)

IYKYK: A man who downvotes this is never a whole man ;)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/307690/Sleeping_Dogs_Definitive_Edition/

And my last post since I could recommend games for days xD.

Demonstar: Original Missions (1999 re-released in 2024 with some fine upgrades) not on sale but only 3 euros.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2577180/DemonStar/

Supercow originally released in 2005 or something.

Re released: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1883570/Supercow/

What a great post idea, thanks OP!

My contribution is NeonXSZ, a 6DOF open-world ARPG by a solo dev. It's been a decade since it released, but IIRC, the dev cited Quake and Diablo as primary inspirations and the game has a native Linux version.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/296010/NeonXSZ/

I discovered totally by accident Proverbs.

Proverbs is a picross/minesweeper hybrid featuring a single ENORMOUS puzzle, inspired by Bruegel the Elder's 1559 painting "Netherlandish Proverbs".

In short, it's minesweeper with a twist. It's pretty relaxing, you can do it while listening to podcasts or YouTube. Also, what I like is that you never have to make hypotheses. Everything is solvable just by looking.

Gunz: The Duel is planning a comeback some time this year; tl;dr extremely niche 2005 korean team/solo shooter famous for the playerbase essentially creating a hyper-mobile fighting game but with guns out of the incredibly glitchy but consistently glitchy movement and animation system. If you've never played it it has a huge skill barrier to entry (that I'm sure will be tutorialized in this modern reboot) but is incredibly fun and satisfying with a huge skill ceiling.

Nantucket. You're Ishmael and you're finishing the job, no matter how many whales you need to butcher. With cards and dice. And sea shanties.

Recursed is a very difficult puzzle game about recursion.

I think the only really obscure game I've played where I have significant playing time is: Nation Red.

It's an enjoyable little zombie twin-stick shooter / bullet hell game.

Another decent one is Deathtrap. It's a tower defense game with a gothic/dark soulsy aesthetic.

Weirdlands

Holy shit. so many i never heard of! I can only offer this old underrated gem: https://store.steampowered.com/app/243970/Invisible_Inc/ Invisible inc. very good stealth/strategy game in a cyberpunk setting.

Let's see how many people know about Bloodthief.

Insanely unique concept. You gather blood and use it to fuel hyper fast parkour movement and combat. Everything is a one hit kill, everything is insanely slick. It feels really good to play, and I don't even normally like this style of game.

Oh, thought of another one to list here: Micro Mages. It's not just NES styled game, but an actual NES game with a emulation wrapper around it for Steam. You actually get a NES ROM when you buy the game that's playable in all the emulators I've thrown it into. I've actually got a copy of the rom on my 3DS.

The real interesting thing that the devs put out a video about the challenges of fitting their game onto a NES cart (which is actually how I found out about the game). While the game is kinda small, (I think... I haven't actually beaten it) it's well worth the current sale price 99 cents.

I'll throw in another one, why not. Withering Rooms is one of my absolute favorite games I've played this year. It's an action/light horror roguelike that ends up being a very unique experience despite clear inspiration from games like Silent Hill and Dark Souls. For a solo developer game (who even wrote the wonderful music himself) it's a seriously impressive game, especially with the amount of small QOL touches. I thought the puzzles were intuitive personally, but I loved and appreciated that there is both an in-game "Puzzle Oracle" consumable if you are stuck, and a tiered hint section on the website if you need a nudge.

There's a ton of builds you can do, from various magic builds to melee and ranged and traps and more. The story is also very interesting, the world building is excellent and I enjoyed the writing. It really nails a certain vibe that very few games get right. For me, exploring this unique and interesting but dangerous world filled with a cast of weird and strange characters gave me similar emotions as playing Dark Souls 1 the first time. And it's hard to give higher marks than that.

Amazing game.

zero-k is very nice, opensource too. I think it started as mod for total annihilation or supreme commander and developed into its own thing.

Esports Godfather is one hell of a genre soup: deckbuilder/autobattler/management game/single player MOBA? But trust me, it play way better than it sounds - at least if you're into deckbuilders and management games. My only criticism was that it is a little too easy, but even given that it was easy to sink a lot of hours into it. It's just fun making combos between heroes in battle, setting up the perfect deck through your players or engaging with all the million subsystems in the management mode side.

They did use AI art (supposedly trained on their own work) for the player portraits, so do with that what you will.

Please Fix The Road

Please Fix The Road is a colorful, minimalistic, laid-back and casual puzzle game in which it's probably not hard to guess... you're fixing roads!

I'm recommending it solely for level transitions. 🤷‍♂️

A game that holds a fantastically emotional spot in my heart is Jason Oda’s CONTINUE?9876543210. It has a mixed rating by the general public, but holds the very core of my faith.

At the start, a video game character dies, and is scheduled for deletion. Eventually, the garbage collector that filters through the computer’s RAM, deleting levels that have served their purpose, characters of memory damage and mangled speech, and reflections on what it it is to be dying, all deleted. The goal of the game is to find peace in the milliseconds of afterlife, however that happens.

we all fear deletion
those who were deleted
i took with me
their lightning, their prayer

https://store.steampowered.com/app/263340/Continue9876543210/

(yes! I got a downvote! Someone else knows this game!)

A game I like and I never see mentioned anywhere is Out of Space it's similar to Overcooked except a lot less chaotic.

An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs

This is a delightful little indie game where you have to talk to stock photos of dogs and complete little unhinged quests. It's been on gdq in the awful block with the dev before, but only 221 reviews as of now

Levelhead is a Mario Maker-esque platformer with a huge emphasis on user-made levels and a very powerful level editor. It's not too active right now but there's thousands of awesome levels already made that you can play. The game is dirt cheap, too.

Endless Ages - you won't find it on steam

Ex-Zodiac - retro star fox inspired rails shooter

Aero GPX - Really fast SciFi themed racing game. Very much inspire by the F-Zero series.

Bound by Blood is an old, rather difficult, action RPG with an interesting premise: you’re transforming into a demon and the player’s actions determine how much you change.

KeeperFX: an opensource Dungeon Keeper remake and fan expansion. It's a '97 retro game with a 3D map and 2D sprites where you manage a dungeon and kill the good guys.

https://keeperfx.net/

I also mod a community about all Dungeon Keeper like games here Lemmy: !dungeonkeeper@lemmy.world

Ed-0: Zombie Uprising - A japanese 3rd Person Zombie Action Roguelike. It's silly, it's fun, it's pretty hard sometimes!

Crushed In Time

A point and click in the same vein as There Is No Game by the same studio, that came out recently and that I haven't seen people talk about at all, unfortunately already past its introductory offer

Sword of the Necromancer : Resurrection.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2782880/Sword_of_the_Necromancer_Resurrection/

Best played co-op. Wonderful story with a great ending. Truly beautiful and solid game play. Short 12hr game to 100% complete.

Only like 150 reviews.